I went all around the table and I saw the host lying on the ground, not moving, not breathing, not blinking, his eyes wide open, looking somewhere underneath the tablecloth. My hands were over my mouth.A dead man, a dead man, a dead man.
I’d seen a dead body before. I’d seen Jinx, but that was different. Her face had been stuck almost smiling when she died. So peaceful—but the host’s had frozen in horror.
A hand on my arm pulled me back just as the ground began to move. Vines and ropes and sticks from the forest floorrosein the air, reached for the body of the host, and they began to wrap around it.
Screaming, crying, sobbing.
No sound leftme,though, as I watched how those roots, twisting and turning like arms, moved the host’s body sothey could wrap all around him better, until not an inch of him was visible to us anymore.
Within seconds, the roots had swallowed him, hat and face and vest and all.
Then something rang on the other side, and I did jump and I did scream and I did expect the world to go dark right away.
It didn’t, though. It was just the oven chiming.
The cake inside it was baked, and it chimed like a boiling kettle while a single ribbon of smoke curled up toward the canopy.
The next second, the clocks began to vibrate, then groan—then stopped.
The hands on them moved in unison.
The next time I blinked, it was seven o’clock in the forest. The tea party was officially over.
43
The game gave us our youth back. I’d have never noticed if I hadn’t seen the others simply snap back to the way they were before. And when I looked down at my hands, I found no more wrinkles on my skin.None.
Nobody was happy about it, though. Nobody even mentioned it becausenowwas not the time.
So we ran.
Reggie was no longer shouting and the others were no longer crying.
Iwas no longer shaking, either, only focused on my legs, trying to get them to move faster so we could get out of that place for good. We’d baked the hour. The clocks had moved. Time was no longer stuck.
And the host was dead, swallowed by the forest floor.
Then we saw the boxes.
More light slipped through the canopy here. Maybe the sun had already climbed up in the sky all the way, because there was enough light for us to see the four wooden boxes abandoned there on the floor.
We’d started running back in the direction we’d come from when the clocks turned at the tea party.
Come to think of it, by now we should have been out in the arena, but we weren’t.
Instead these boxes were just…there.
“The second part,”said Levana in a shaky voice.
Realization hit me like a fist to the face. The White Queen had already told us that the fourth trial would have two parts. We were only done with the first.
“FUCK!” shouted Seth. “I don’t want another game! Let me out of here, you fuckers! Let us all out!”
I shared his sentiment, I really did. But things were as they were, and shouting at the canopy wasn’t going to get us anywhere, so I joined the others who’d gone to open the boxes to see what was inside.
I expected a lot of things.
Weaponswas not one of them.
